Saturday, 10 August 2013

How weep for Guantanamo when your College is Abu Ghraib?

A University in Kerala has decided not to include a poem- 'Ode to the Sea', by a terrorist formerly incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay- in a book called 'Poetry and Protest' intended for its students.Kafila, a leftist Indian blog, has published an anguished howl of outrage at this brutal and barbaric act. 'Universities,' we are told, ' are meant to pursue the idea of excellence. Excellence is achieved only by training minds to be courageous to wade into difficult, turbulent, intellectual waters. This is why the University of Iowa, an American University decided to publish Al Rubaish's 'Ode to the Sea'. America is the fountainhead of the war on terror. Why does an American University have this courage to publish this poem and why do we lack it? Does this have something to do with what we want to become? Or, is this the difference between ‘average’ and ‘excellence’ ?

Just imagine the consequences of a corn fed sophomore at Iowa State achieving excellence because his mind has been trained to courageously wade into such very difficult, turbulent, intellectual water as that presented by a poem which shows a stupid, sentimental, self pitying Arab terrorist complaining bitterly that the ‘Infidels’ are holding him prisoner and the Sea is not coming to his rescue thus proving it is disobedient to God. Young Nazis could achieve similar intellectual excellence by reading poems from Auschwitz victims bemoaning the manner in which gas chambers compromised their ability to slaughter Christian children for the Passover feast.Eichmann himself would have loved to deconstruct a poem like-

Shema Israel! An apostate is this Auschwitz's Hydrogen Cyanide

As lethal as the fart from our great Rabbi's back side

Killing Christian kids. Ah! let us all say Kaddish

This gas's behaviour really is baddish.

But no such poems were written, not even by the Heidegger loving Celan, because the Jews at Auschwitz were innocent victims not worthless psychopaths.

The young student at Iowa will have his eyes opened when he realizes that Al Rubbish type nut-jobs experience orgasm every time some tsunami wipes out some non-Muslims but gets very angry when the Sea disobeys Allah by being nice and quiet and suitable for swimming. This shows terrorists from Muslim countries are intellectually very advanced and the cause they espouse is not utterly contemptible at all. Once they are repatriated from Guantanamo to their own country, they go underground and try to foment jihadis assassinations of non-believers, including the Shiites, the Saudi Royals and other such sub-human scum.Why are students from Kerala being denied the chance to achieve a similar stellar excellence in gauging the ineffable intellectual sublimity of this great Al Rubbish terrorist nutjob of a poet?It is because the Professors want them to be 'average' only in their appreciation of Islam and not achieve the 'excellence' of those geniuses in Iowa?Before turning to the deep pedagogic question posed, let us review the facts.

Kerala is ten times riches than Iowa. Unlike Iowa, it totally lacks a substantial and politically powerful Muslim community. Young Keralites don’t need jobs in Saudi Arabia. They would never dream of going there to work. Thus they should be encouraged to think of this Al Rubbish terrorist nut-job as a great poet. Suppose they are going for Hajj. They can chat with the security guards at the Saudi airport about the great poet. Will Saudi Arabia dare to arrest them? No! Kerala is ten times as powerful as America. Furthermore, Kerala is the leading supporter of Israel. The Christian fundamentalists of Mid West Kerala firmly believe that Israel must be supported at any cost because there is a Biblical prophesy that the ‘Rapture’ will be triggered only by the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. Thus, reading the terrorist's poem will help Kerala's students gain confidence in the correctness of the World View of their parents- which by itself will spur them to similar achievements.Unlike the people of Iowa, the people of Kerala have been engaged in a war against 'Islamist' terrorists, ever since 9/11, and still have troops engaged in active combat on the soil of Muslim countries. Thus, reading this terrorist's worthless shite will certainly stimulate them to yet more consummate achievements in pedagogic contexts like Abu Ghraib.

There was a time when a boy with 8th standard English from a small Kerala village could rise to be the Reform Commissioner in New Delhi. Now India has PhD's from the English Dept who can't get even the meanest sort of white collar job without some species of Political jobbery or Affirmative Action because Kafila's prescription for 'excellence' has been fanatically followed for the last thirty years. How can we weep for Guantanamo when Indian Universities are Abu Ghraib's where young people's brains are so relentlessly buggered with that they can have no hope of actually learning to speak the English language with sufficient proficiency to get even an entry level Call Center job?